Family Pride

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Right wing moralists seem to believe they're operating in a cartoon universe where rendering people invisible can be done with a magic wand. At the very least, that seems to be their strategy when it comes to removing gays and lesbians from actual kid cartoons.

In January, PBS dropped an episode of Postcards From Buster after Education Secretary Margaret Spellings complained that the show's animated bunny, created to teach literary skills to real-live kids, had hopped over to see a Vermont girl with two gay moms. Also in early 2005, James Dobson, founder and chairman of the conservative group Focus on the Family, scolded Nickelodeon's SpongeBob SquarePants for embracing the Southern Poverty Law Center's Declaration of Tolerance, which preaches respect for people whose sexual orientation is 'different from my own.'

While these alarmists work overtime to convey the impression that merely telling kids about homosexuality is radioactive, the fact remains that queer folk are here to stay. As Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Debra Chasnoff wrote in a February op-ed piece in The Washington Post: 'Even if we keep Buster the bunny from visiting children whose parents are gay, we can't put the rabbit back in the hat.'

In fact, what those swayed by Dobson and Spellings ignore is that open-minded educators and activists were working to include sexual orientation within the range of 'acceptable' diversity long before SpongeBob dared to hold hands with Patrick the Starfish. Chasnoff, for one, has braved the political minefield with her educational children's films, which are screened at children's museums nationwide through the Respect For All Project (www.womedia.org). That's a Family! treats same-sex parents as a healthy and normal part of the family tree. Let's Get Real looks at various forms of bullying, including what Chasnoff calls 'the slur of choice' -- anti-gay name-calling.

The Families All Matter Book Project (www.amazeworks.org) has created teaching materials used in hundreds of elementary school classrooms, including a list of some 60 storybooks that portray a range of family formations. 'What we're promoting is tolerance, pluralism, respect, and unity -- what used to be thought of as common American values,' says Lyn Mitchell, the project's outreach coordinator.

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